Andy Warhol: Works from the Hall Collection is currently showing at the Ashmolean of Oxford. This spring exhibition will be on until May 15th 2016, and has so far received great reviews; to which I’ll add mine! What is firstly interesting about the Warhol exhibition is perhaps the museum in which it is set. …

Having not written anything in a while, let me introduce very briefly and informally a Surrealist sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. In 1932, Giacometti designed one of his most gruesome and misogynistic works, the Woman with her Throat Cut. Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss artist, known generally for his elongated walking men, which sporadically make … Continue reading →

Claes Oldenburg’s fun and funny sculpture, Lipstick Ascending on Caterpillar Tracks, originally installed in 1969 on Beinecke Plaza of Yale, is a great example of the revolution in art which was happening in the 1960s. Oldenburg was born in Stockholm in 1929, his family settled in Chicago in 1936. Between 1946 and 1954, he studied … Continue reading →

A change of philosophy occurred in Surrealism around 1926. From believing that automatism and objectivity could free the inner substance of men, Surrealists started to anchor this belief onto inner desires. Further, being into the idea that art was a collective thing, and that getting to know your inner self and desires was a community … Continue reading →

André Breton, editor of Littérature and leader of the Surrealist movement, was faced during the late 1920s with an arch-rival in the person of Georges Bataille, who himself published the review Documents. While both men had similar intellectual, literary, and artistic interests, what opposed them was their take on human existence and experience within society. … Continue reading →

A rough piece acting as a timeline of Surrealism… After four years of boundary-breaking experimentations, and a few fall-outs, Tristan Tzara, the main representative of Dada, had lost hope and exhausted all of the movement’s potential. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1920 to preach Dada, it became apparent to the Littérature group leader, André … Continue reading →

Following from the previous posts about Dada, let’s explore what happened upon the movement’s arrival in Paris. In January 1920, Dada officially arrived in the French capital, through the arrival of Tristan Tzara, the main man of the Zürich branch. He was shortly followed by the poet/artist Hans Arp, who, as of April 1920, had … Continue reading →

The term ‘Dada’ was coined by the Zürich branch of the movement, of which the main philosophy is explained in an earlier post. In short, during World War I, Switzerland was neutral. Gathered there were young artists who, scared of what humanity could do, and fed up with the butchery of war, attempted to alleviate … Continue reading →